9. Chiang Advances, the Reds Retreat

Chiang Kai-shek commenced a veiled campaign to undermine the Wuhan government, buying off generals or encouraging them to defect and attack the Wuhan regime. The Wuhan officials did not prepare for possible assault or consolidate their hold on their core area of Hunan and Hubei provinces. They also failed to make sure their rear and access to the sea in Guangdong province was secure by reining in Li Jishen.1

Wuhan had at its command about 60,000 troops under the Hunan warlord Tang Shengzhi, who supported the government. Instead of using these troops to secure what territory Wuhan already had, Borodin conceived the idea of countering Chiang Kai-shek's success at Shanghai and Nanjing by launching a "second northern expedition" at Beijing to drive out the northern warlords. He proposed that Wuhan ally itself with Feng Yuxiang and seek support of Yan Xishan, warlord of Shanxi province, whose major reason for survival was that he had avoided alliances of any kind.

In April, 1927, Wuhan gave Feng Yuxiang a huge bribe (730,000 Chinese dollars) and approved a northern campaign to join forces with Feng at Zhengzhou on the Yellow river and capture Beijing. After this was accomplished, the plan called for an expedition to destroy the Nanjing regime. It was a harebrained scheme because Borodin and the Wuhan leaders sent most of their reliable troops northward against the northern warlords, thereby denuding the rear areas, and Feng Yuxiang was notoriously deceitful and unreliable.

To protect himself, Chiang Kai-shek also launched a cautious drive of his own northward, moving through Anhui and Jiangsu toward Xuzhou. Chiang faced remnants of the warlord Sun Chuanfang's armies and the stronger forces of the Shandong warlord, Zhang Zongchang. But neither fought Chiang hard. Fearful of harm to Japanese civilians living in Shandong, the new Japanese prime minister, Tanaka Giichi, sent two-thousand Japanese troops to Qingdao, a move that angered the Chinese people and caused boycotts of Japanese goods. Japan evacuated these troops early in September, 1927.2

The Wuhan drive, under Tang Shengzhi, ventured northward from Wuhan against Beijing warlord We Peifu while Feng Yuxiang drove eastward out of Shaanxi with his large army against virtually no opposition. Several of Wu Peifu's commanders were in the pay of Wuhan and allowed Tang's troops to pass unmolested into Henan. Wu made a stand at Zhumadian but Tang's troops decisively beat him, though suffering substantial casualties. Tang continued north, attacking the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin, and forcing him backward on May 17 but again suffered heavy casualties.

The Wuhan leadership now found itself caught in a dilemma of its own making: most of its troops were deeply committed against Zhang Zuolin while Wuhan's major base area of Hunan and Hubei was exposed. General Xia Douyin, in the pay of Chiang Kai-shek, withdrew a division he commanded at Ichang, west of Wuhan, and moved against Wuhan. Most of the Wuhan garrison appeared to be in league with Xia but the Communist garrison commander, Ye Ting, scratched up a few troops commanded by other Communists and on May 19 drove Xia's force away.

Two days after Xia's defeat, a regiment left to guard the Hunan capital, Changsha, revolted, arrested a large number of suspected Communists, dissolved the provincial government and went on a killing spree.

Meanwhile, the main Wuhan army in northern Henan shattered Zhang Zuolin's position and drove the Manchurians beyond the Yellow river. But the battles had cost the Wuhan army more than 14,000 casualties, leaving it dangerously weakened, while Feng Yuxiang's forces joined the Wuhan army at Zhengzhou, having lost a mere four-hundred men.

Meanwhile, in Moscow the executive committee of the Communist International ordered an agrarian revolution while also commanding the Chinese Communists to remain allied with the left Kuomintang and transform the Wuhan forces into a genuine revolutionary army. Moscow thereby imposed a formula which guaranteed defeat. The left KMT leaders refused to countenance an agrarian revolution and were not interested in transforming their forces into a revolutionary army. M.N. Roy, the Comintern agent in China, immediately wired back asking for a way out of the dilemma.

Roy's appeal brought forth a famous wire from Stalin, received June 1, 1927. Of all the events in the history of the Communist movement in China, it remains one of the most remarkable in its almost complete divorce from the reality of conditions existing. Stalin in effect called for Communist takeover of the Kuomintang and creation of a large Communist army. The Reds were to throw reactionary KMT leaders "into discard," "liquidate the dependence upon unreliable generals immediately" and create a revolutionary army by organizing "about 20,000 Communists and 50,000 revolutionary workers," though he offered no suggestions as to where the CCP could find weapons to arm this proposed force. Stalin also demanded that the peasants seize land but that "excesses must be combated" by peasant unions themselves, not troops. It was hopeless. How could the Reds control irate and long-oppressed peasants to prevent "excesses," "discard" the Wuhan leadership or, with Chiang Kai-shek's forces already attacking, eliminate Wuhan's dependence upon the warlord generals? And the idea of creating a large Communist army from scratch in this crisis situation was ludicrous.

The Comintern agent, Roy, compounded the error by showing Stalin's wire to Wang Jingwei, the Wuhan chief. This alerted Wang and guaranteed a quick decision by the left KMT to eliminate the Communists from the government while there was still time.3

On June 6 the Wuhan leadership traveled to Zhengzhou to confer with Feng Yuxiang. With the Wuhan army greatly weakened, Feng was in the position of power. He was all smiles and promises and assured the Wuhan leaders he would support them against the Beijing warlords but would not agree to a campaign against Chiang Kai-shek. In exchange, he got control of the entire province of Henan, which Wuhan troops had just captured. Wuhan's effort to gain an alliance with the Shanxi warlord, Yan Xishan, failed.

As it turned out, Feng's promise was useless. Feng went two weeks later to confer with Chiang Kai-shek. In consideration of a much larger bribe from Chiang (two million Chinese dollars), Feng agreed to switch sides and use his power to compel Wuhan to send Borodin and other Russians back to the Soviet Union, expel the Communists and persuade KMT members to come to Nanjing to reunite the party. On June 21, 1927, Feng sent an ultimatum to Wuhan.

For Borodin, the message was clear: his mission was ended. For the weak leftists in the Wuhan government, there was no choice: they could never sustain a confrontation with Chiang and the warlords he was able to assemble with his "silver bullet" bribes. Even their most reliable general, Tang Shengzhi, was alarmed about the disorders of the peasant movement and would not back a radical leftist-Communist government in Wuhan.

The Comintern on July 13 ordered the Communists to withdraw from the Wuhan government but not the KMT. This duplicity was too much for Chen Duxiu, party secretary and a founder of the party. He resigned and soon escaped to Shanghai. Other Communists disappeared or went into hiding. The Wuhan government announced the formal break on July 16. Counterrevolutionary forces immediately began a hunt for Communists, killing any suspicious persons they found. Soong Ching-ling, Sun Yat-sen's widow, publicly condemned the anti-revolutionary course her Wuhan colleagues were following, then slipped in disguise to Shanghai and from there went secretly to Moscow.4

The Russian advisors and other staff began leaving China in late June. M.N. Roy left early, along with most of the officers. But Borodin resolved to remain as long as there was any hope. He also had a personal reason for delaying: his wife, Fanya, had been captured on February 28 with some other Russians from a Soviet ship stopped by Shandong forces. They now were being confined in a Beijing jail until a "trial" could be arranged to overcome Western sensibilities. Thereafter, Zhang Zuolin, who had ordered Li Dazhao and his daughter strangled, was looking forward to doing the same to Fanya. However, Borodin had access to 200,000 Chinese dollars of a special Soviet fund for just such a situation. In the early hours of July 12, after negotiations with the Soviet legal attaché, the judge handling the case held a quick trial, found everyone innocent and ordered their immediate release. He took the next ship to Japan and enjoyed a comfortable retirement with the bribe money.

Soviet agents quickly spirited the Russians other than Fanya out of Beijing and toward Russia. Other agents took Fanya, the only one Zhang Zuolin really wanted, to a former Confucian temple converted to quarters for foreigners. To conceal her presence, Soviet officials spread false accounts of her arrival in Vladivostok, conducted an "interview" on the Trans-Siberian railway and gave out an "arrival statement" in Moscow. When the manhunt died down in late August, she slipped out of Beijing disguised as a nun and hurried to Siberia under escort.

Borodin also spent much of July in hiding. But, after intensive diplomatic maneuvering, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to allow him and the remaining Russians to depart but not through his territory. Since they also couldn't go through the land held by the northern warlords, this meant they had to return through the Gobi desert, a trip that took him and his group until mid-September, 1927 to complete.5

* * * * * * * * * *

The Chinese Communists, now thrust into the wilderness, debated extreme plans to save their movement. They were encouraged by the three-way split of the Kuomintang between the Wuhan faction, the right-wing "Western Hills" group still holding on to the KMT's old headquarters in Shanghai and Chiang Kai-shek's government in Nanjing. They also were emboldened by Chiang's growing difficulties in Shandong against the Beijing warlords. Chiang had weakened this front to send troops against Wuhan. The Shandong warlord Zhang Zongchang recaptured Xuzhou on July 25 and his ally, warlord Sun Chuanfang, launched a drive to recapture his old base in the lower Yangzi valley. Chiang Kai-shek's forces retreated rapidly back toward Nanjing.6

The Chinese Communists' first priority was to take over all or parts of an army headquartered at Nanchang in northern Jiangxi and use it to fight their way through to eastern Guangdong province and there establish a new base. They got encouragement from Besso Lominadze, a newly arrived Comintern delegate, and General Galen, who still remained in China. The army which they targeted was commanded by Zhang Fakui and had about 30,000 men. A good portion of these troops were commanded by Communist officers.7

A small group of Communists approved the plans: Lominadze, Galen and Qu Qiubai, a 28-year-old Red writer who spoke Russian. Qu had positioned himself to take over the leadership role vacated by Chen Duxiu. The military leaders were Ye Ting, the Red garrison commander who had driven off the spring attack on Wuhan, and He Long, not yet a Communist but a highly respected commander in Zhang Fakui's army. The plotters hoped Zhang himself would go along with a revolt but when the uprising took place on August 1, 1927, celebrated thereafter as the birthdate of the Red army, Zhang did not commit himself and only about 11,000 men formed up under the Communist leaders.

The rebellion aroused little support among the people of Nanchang and loyal KMT forces began to move on the city. The rebel force decided to march south toward Guangdong, 350 air miles distant, making no attempt to stir up the peasantry along the way. Troop strength dwindled rapidly. One of the three divisions escaped when its general defected. Many men deserted, others fell sick. Chiang Kai-shek's troops attacked at several points, causing substantial casualties. The force, now down to fewer than 6,000, briefly occupied Shantao in late September, 1927, and soon thereafter disintegrated. Many of the Communist leaders slipped away to Hong Kong. The remnants under Zhu De escaped into the mountains.8 The whole episode had been a fiasco.

On August 7, shortly after the army mutineers in Nanchang had marched off toward Guangdong, the CCP central committee held an emergency conference in Wuhan. Only about half the members could attend but they made major decisions. Led by Lominadze and Qu Qiubai, elected head of a new ruling political bureau (politburo), the party voted to become rigidly centralized and secret. As demanded by Lominadze, it also condemned the party patriarch, Chen Duxiu for "opportunism," unfairly blaming him for the failure of the alliance with the KMT. The party vowed to overthrow both the Wuhan and Nanjing regimes, organize revolts in the countryside during the autumn harvest period but conduct them under the banner of the "revolutionary left Kuomintang," not the Chinese Communist party. Only the land of big landlords was to be seized and soviets or worker and peasant governing councils were not to be formed, so as to avoid an open struggle with the KMT.

The central committee elected Mao Zedong a member of the politburo and named him to be in charge of an uprising in Hunan, one of two planned for the late summer. The other was set for Hubei south of Wuhan. The committee expected both to overthrow the Wuhan government and set up a people's government. But it wanted peasants to constitute the main force, not existing military units.9

The Hubei effort quickly failed because the leaders realized their poorly armed and trained peasants could not attack two walled towns. The revolt petered out into scattered riots and killings.

Mao Zedong, however, had different ideas about how to make a rural revolt successful and he was not afraid to advance them. At the August 7 conference he told the other Communists they had not grasped resolutely the issue of a military movement. Here, for the first time, Mao enunciated his famous aphorism: "We must be aware that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."10

Back in Hunan, he wrote the central committee that Communists should abandon the Nationalist flag and "immediately and resolutely raise the red flag" which signified revolution. Mao also said the party must come out firmly in favor of "a complete solution to the land question," meaning confiscation and redistribution of all land without exception, not just property of big landlords. The response from the central committee was for Mao to obey orders.

Mao's most radical concept, however, was just now being formed and the results of the Hunan uprising clarified the idea in his mind. What it amounted to was to stop relying upon unorganized and largely unarmed peasants, however enthusiastic. He was convinced dedication of the masses to revolution was not enough. The masses could not go up against KMT armies firing machine guns and cannon without adequate arms, military training and discipline. Only reliable, effective Red armies, or at least disciplined guerrilla units, dedicated to the revolution, could fight organized enemy armies and win.

The CCP central committee wanted Mao to stir up the Hunanese peasantry and, with them, launch a series of simultaneous attacks over a large portion of Hunan, a province nearly as large as Great Britain. Mao opposed this vastly overambitious plan. In defiance, Mao restricted his efforts to the vicinity of Changsha.

In addition to peasants, Mao had four so-called "regiments," spread ninety miles apart in three locations. The first regiment was the depleted unit of the Wuhan government which had helped to drive Xia Douyin's division away from Wuhan in May. This force found a unit of deserters from Xia Douyin at Xiushui in Jiangxi near the Hunan border. These deserters were now led by a former bandit and constituted Mao Zedong's second "regiment." The former Wuhan unit, still angry at Xia's sneak attack, drove the turncoat force out of town. When Mao arrived in Hunan, he found two of his "regiments" eyeing one another suspiciously around Xiushui. Mao's third "regiment" consisted of peasants and bandits from areas east of Changsha and the fourth a thousand militant miners from Anyuan, just across the border in Jiangxi. Neither of the last two units had more than rudimentary training or equipment.

The plans called for the first two regiments on September 11 to attack Pingjiang, about 60 miles northeast of Changsha, and for the other two to assault Liuyang, about 30 miles east of the capital. They were then to descend upon Changsha, whereupon the city would respond with a mass uprising. However, the violent attack by the rebelling regiment in Changhsa on May 21 had reduced the number of Communists there to only a thousand and they would have a difficult time rousing the populace.

Things went bad from the outset. The first two regiments, instead of attacking Pingjiang, fought each other and the former Wuhan unit now suffered defeat and withdrew into the mountains of Jiangxi. The third and fourth regiments, after several abortive efforts, captured Liuyang but Wuhan troops surrounded them and killed or captured most of the members. With the organized military forces shattered, Mao called off the uprising inside Changsha.

Wuhan militia captured Mao Zedong while he was moving between units and marched him to within two hundred yards of militia headquarters, where doubtless he was to be shot. At this point he broke free and ran into the fields. He hid in tall grass while soldiers and peasants forced to help search came near several times. At nightfall, Mao set off across the mountains, finally reaching a point in the mountains dividing Hunan and Jiangxi where he had designated survivors to assemble. He persuaded the battered soldiers to retreat to the famous bandit bastion, Jinggang shan, in the Luoxiao mountains dividing Hunan and Jiangxi. It was a long and arduous trip and Mao had only a thousand men when he reached sanctuary in these rugged, heavily forested heights and protected valleys. Zhu De and his six-hundred men joined Mao in the spring of 1928.11 In these forbidding heights, Mao brought together revolutionaries and "floating elements" of Chinese society, including bandits, and other disaffected persons. Mao recognized the revolutionary potential of such people, alienated from conventional society because of harsh taxation and exploitation.12

In the Jinggang shan Mao worked on his idea of how to win the revolution. He and Zhu De laid the foundations for a new kind of army with a new kind of soldier. This army over time came to be as democratic as a hierarchical command structure can be. Unlike other armies, there was no distinct officers corps separated by class and education from the men. There were no ranks, no insignia. Men became leaders by demonstrating their ability. Men addressed commanders by their job titles, like "comrade platoon commander" or "comrade company commander." Officers did not beat or mistreat the men. Everyone lived together, ate the same food, dressed alike. The Red Army actively proselyted soldiers from opposing forces and, because treatment was better, many men deserted to them. As Mao Zedong wrote, "The newly captured soldiers in particular feel that our army and the Kuomintang's army are worlds apart. They feel that, though in material life they are worse off in the Red army than in the White army, spiritually they are liberated." The Red cadres or leadership groups forbade soldiers seizing food or property from the peasants. They punished rape, robbery and violence harshly. The Communist soldier came to be seen by the people as a friend, not, as was often the case of warlord or KMT soldiers, as a plague. Leaders indoctrinated everyone in the politics of revolution and tried to make every soldier an enthusiastic supporter of a new order in China. Leaders encouraged soldiers to discuss and solve various everyday problems. This led to a practice, almost unheard of in other armies, of giving soldiers extensive precombat briefings about the tactical situation and battle plans. While the leaders expected soldiers to obey orders promptly, they took pains to explain why the orders were important.13

Mao now passed out of touch with the CCP central committee and didn't learn for months that the leadership, seeking a scapegoat for its foolish plan to seize Hunan, blamed him and dismissed him from the politburo. The CCP secretary, Qu Qiubai, and other politburo members feared they would be discovered in Wuhan and made their way to Shanghai, where they reestablished secret party headquarters in October, 1927.

* * * * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek also was suffering military defeat and political troubles. Chiang's forces on the northern front collapsed and the warlord Sun Chuanfang in early August was nearing his old base around Nanjing and Shanghai. Chiang could not rouse his generals to do anything. They were unhappy with Chiang's leadership abilities and weary of his pettifogging ways. They also were dissatisfied with Chiang's obduracy about reaching a settlement with the Wuhan faction, now that it had ousted the Communists.14 Even Chiang's supporter He Yingqin, commander of the 1st Corps, began to waver.

The matter came to a head at a meeting of the military council on August 12, 1927. Under pressure, Chiang resigned. However, Chiang had a plan to improve his political position dramatically, and he worked steadily to put it into action.

Shortly after Chiang resigned, Sun Chuanfang's troops succeeded in crossing the Yangzi river east of Nanjing, cutting the rail line to Shanghai. At the same time, the Wuhan military chief, Hunan warlord Tang Shengzhi, sent two corps toward Nanjing in coordination with Sun's offensive. The Nanjing regime was now in crisis and He Yingqin and Li Zongren, a Guangxi warlord and corps commander, threw their forces into a desperate battle against Sun's troops. The battle lasted six days, caused thousands of casualties but finally ended in the victory for the Nanjing army. The military situation abruptly changed.

Now all three of the KMT factions sought an understanding. But the Wuhan chief, Wang Jingwei, didn't get the power he wanted and refused to accept. The Nanjing government, angry because Wang's military prop, Tang Shengzhi, was intriguing with the northern warlords, ordered a campaign against Tang. Led by Li Zongren, Nanjing columns moved west against him along both sides of the Yangzi, while Feng Yuxiang threatened from the north and the Guangdong warlord, Li Jishen, moved from the south. Tang fled to Japan, permitting the Guangxi clique to establish a new power base in Hubei province. The clique also brought in Li Jishen as a member.

Li Jishen was nominally a supporter of Wang Jingwei and invited him and other Wuhan officials to set up a party headquarters in Guangzhou in opposition to Nanjing. Wang and a few of his leftists accepted and arrived on October 29, 1927. General Zhang Fakui remained about the only general still loyal and he brought his remaining troops back to Guangzhou as well. It was clear that Li Jishen could be dangerous because his forces were approximately equal to Zhang's and Li was committed to Wang only to the degree that Wang might help his ambitions.

Wang's rival KMT government in Guangzhou never had more than a flickering chance. Chiang Kai-shek neatly squelched that tiny flame and also destroyed the position of opponents elsewhere by arranging his marriage December 1, 1927, to Soong May-ling, sister of Madame Sun Yat-sen. Sun's widow, Soong Ching-ling, was in Russia at the moment, fleeing from the kind of government Chiang Kai-shek wanted to establish in China. But this meant little to the Chinese people. Chiang's marriage for many Chinese made him the "legitimate heir" of the KMT founder, Sun Yat-sen, who already had become an object of almost religious adoration.15 May-ling was 30 years old, a 1917 graduate of Wellesley College in Massachusetts and spoke perfect English with a strong Southern accent because of the five years she had spent in Georgia. May-ling had grown up in wealth provided by her father, Charlie Soong, and therefore identified with extreme right-wing interests, which Chiang Kai-shek represented. Furthermore, she always had been domineering and was probably attracted to Chiang in the first place because of the power he could put at her disposal.

Chiang had been working on the marriage since April and had enlisted the support of May-ling's other sister, Soong Ai-ling, wife of the wealthy banker, H.H. Kung. The Kung money added much to the attraction of the marriage to Chiang, plus the important connections with the West which the Soong family possessed. On September 28, Chiang boarded ship for Japan, where Charlie Soong's widow was taking the baths at Kamakura, south of Tokyo. There, Chiang got Madame Soong's permission but on condition that he end his marriage to his two present wives and convert to Christianity. Chiang said he would try to become a Christian and he subsequently did so. He also said he had divorced his wives but it is doubtful whether he ever did.

While in Japan, Chiang met with the Japanese prime minister, Tanaka Giichi, who advised Chiang to remain in south China and avoid becoming entangled in the warlord politics of the north. It was a warning that Japan wanted to carve out a broader sphere than just Manchuria. Chiang answered that his drive to the north was imperative and appealed for Japanese assistance, so as to eliminate the appearance that Japan was aiding the warlord Zhang Zuolin.16

In November, Wang Jingwei agreed to discuss reconciliation with the Nanjing faction and left for Shanghai with the Guangdong warlord, Li Jishen. As soon as they were gone Zhang Fakui took over Guangdong province and disarmed most of Li Jishen's soldiers.17 The deceitful exercise undermined Wang's position and left Chiang Kai-shek able to mediate between Wang's left-wing group and Hu Hanmin's conservative faction. It was obvious no other KMT leader had the support Chiang possessed. On December 10 the KMT government, on a motion by Wang, asked Chiang to resume as commander-in-chief.

Just as the KMT negotiators were going home on December 11, 1927, the electrifying news came that the Communists had staged a massive uprising in Guangzhou. Since early November, the CCP leadership had been planning an orthodox urban insurrection modeled on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Some Red leaders charged that Stalin himself ordered the revolt to prove his theory that there was a revolutionary wave in China.18

On December 7, the Guangdong Communist committee secretly held a "worker-peasant-soldier congress" which created a soviet or governing council of fifteen deputies, all intellectuals. The CCP put much faith in the expected rebellion of a cadet training regiment brought to Guangzhou by Zhang Fakui and containing a number of Communist officers. The Communist cadres organized about five-hundred Red Guards and fifteen-hundred workers from unions, plus large numbers of peasants. But there was a severe shortage of weapons. The rebellion was scheduled to break out on December 13 but word leaked out to the authorities by December 9. Ye Ting, insurrection commander, ordered the revolt in the early morning of December 11. The Red Guards and the cadet regiment captured police headquarters and released seven-hundred prisoners taken in raids in the previous two days. Most of these joined the fight. By noon, most police stations had been seized and several headquarters of various military units, most of which were absent from the city. The rebels took over public buildings and began looting banks and shops, burning property and shooting suspected enemies, including about three-hundred police.

The rebels proclaimed a soviet government but only about three-thousand of the city's 290,000 unionized work force took part. Little popular support for the soviet emerged. General Zhang Fakui quickly recalled his troops and went on a killing spree against the Communists, most of whom carried no weapons except sticks and knives. The warlord soldiers slaughtered over two-hundred Communist party members and over two-thousand Red Guards and workers, plus nine Russians.

KMT execution squads then commenced a reign of terror, rounding up men and women who seemed to be suspicious and shooting or beheading them. KMT authorities admitted killing two thousand. There were probably many more. In other Nationalist cities, KMT soldiers went on an orgy of murdering suspected Communists. The Nanjing government closed all Soviet consulates in Nationalist areas and the KMT terminated its "alliance" with the Comintern. Wang Jingwei's regime was completely disgraced and he sailed for France. Zhang Fakui resigned and Li Jishen's troops retook Guangzhou on December 29.

The Chinese Communist leadership had demonstrated in gruesome detail the accuracy of Mao Zedong's argument that revolutions must be won by trained soldiers with guns. The Guangzhou revolt was a foolish, destructive decision by party chieftains and it wiped out much of the good will that the Communist party had developed over the past seven years. The party chief, Qu Qiubai, had shown incredible ineptitude and he was easily ousted by Li Lisan, Xiang Zhongfa and Zhou Enlai.

Chapter 10: Japan Wields an Iron Fist >>

1. The narrative on the 1927 northern campaign, attacks against Hunan and the crisis of the Chinese Communist party is drawn from Cambridge, vol. 12, chapter 11, "The Nationalist Revolution: from Canton to Nanking, 1923-28, by C. Martin Wilbur, professor of history emeritus, Columbia University, pp. 643-72; Seagrave, pp. 234-56; Clubb, pp. 137-42; Hsü, pp. 528-31; Harrison, pp. 98-117; Schram, pp. 98-106; Schwartz, pp. 64-85.

2. Iriye, pp. 146-7, 155; Morton, pp. 75-79, 86-88. General Tanaka, president of the Seiyukai party in the diet, became prime (and foreign) minister on April 19, 1927, upon the fall of the Kenseikai party government of Wakatsuki Reijiro and his moderate foreign minister, Shidehara Kijuro, because of a bank panic and dissatisfaction with Shidehara's conciliatory policy toward China.

3. Seagrave, pp. 253-4; Schwartz, pp. 81-82; Harrison, pp. 111-2.

4. Seagrave, pp. 246-49; Cambridge, vol. 12, p. 668.

5. Seagrave, pp. 249-52; Cambridge, vol. 12, pp. 671-2. Anna Louise Strong, who accompanied Borodin, wrote an account of the journey in China's Millions, New York: Coward McCann, 1928. As was the case with most of the loyal Communists who served Joseph Stalin, Borodin got little thanks. Stalin was not pleased with the failure of the KMT-Communist alliance in China and doubtless placed some of the blame on Borodin, instead of on himself, where it belonged. Borodin was assigned to several mediocre jobs before he was named editor of the English-language Moscow News in 1932. In 1949, Borodin was arrested, along with other Jewish intellectuals, in the mad postwar purges Stalin ordered in 1949. Borodin was sent to some Siberian prison, and there he died in 1951. His reputation has been rehabilitated in Soviet Union and Russian scholars have written of his contributions to the Chinese revolution. See New York Times, September 3, 1953, and July 1, 1964; Seagrave, p. 256; Cambridge, vol. 12, p. 672, footnote.

6. Cambridge, vol. 12, pp. 682-89.

7. The narrative on the Nanchang and autumn harvest (Hunan, Hubei) revolts is drawn from Harrison, pp. 118-23; Cambridge, vol. 12, pp. 673-81; Schram, pp. 104-14, 120-5; Guillermaz, pp. 150-6. See also Roy Hofheinz, Jr., "The Autumn Harvest Uprising," China Quarterly (London) 32 (Oct.-Dec. 1967) pp. 37-87; Hofheinz, pp. 39-48; and Hsiao Tso-liang, Chinese Communism in 1927: City vs. Countryside, Hong Kong: the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1970, pp. 39-80; Griffith, pp. 18-22, 24-25.

8. Agnes Smedley wrote an excellent book on Zhu De: The Great Road: the Life and Times of Chu Teh, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956.

9. Cambridge, vol. 13, chapter 4, "The Communist Movement 1927-1937," by Jerome Ch'en, professor of history, York University, Toronto, p. 186.

10. Cambridge, vol. 13, chapter 14, "Mao Tse-tung's Thought to 1949," by Stuart Schram, professor of politics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, p. 822.

11. Snow, pp. 165-6.

12. Selden, pp. 25-27.

13. Griffith, pp. 29-30; Alexander, pp. 299-301.

14. Cambridge, vol. 12, pp. 682-89; Clubb, pp. 140-43; Iriye, p. 148-9.

15. Seagrave, pp. 261-8.

16. Cambridge, vol. 12, pp. 686-7; Iriye, pp. 157-8; Morton, pp. 97-98.

17. FRUS, 1927, vol. 2, pp. 35-36.

18. Schwartz, pp. 105-08; Cambridge, vol. 12, pp. 689-96; FRUS, 1927, vol. 2, pp. 38-44.